I just recently built myself a nice little system after 6 long years of having the same crap pc. I Had previously built my last 2 pc's myself. I don't buy crap pre-built systems.

This new 2500k system is great, I even tried cranking up the gpu a bit with nice results. I also use an aftermarket cooler to keep temps down.

I turned Intel Turbo off also.

But my question is this, why does this system have a hard time playing minecraft on high graphics?

I can play on what's called "Fast Graphics, Smooth Lighting ON , Normal or far render distance and Advanced opengl ON (As of Minecraft 1.5)"

On Low, I get well over 150 fps, so the performance is there.

BTW Advanced OpenGL in minecraft is Occlusion culling, for those who didn't know.

As soon as I turn it on Fancy Graphics , I get massive stutter or choppy frame rates, which shouldn't happen.

I have Windows 7 64 bit, 8gb of 1333mhz ram, The latest Intel gfx drivers (15.21.13.64.2342), the latest mobo firmware, hell I even lowered my CAS latency of my memory from 11 to 9, My memory is cas 9 but my mobo had it set at 11. That did help a bit but not much.

I also removed ALL bloatware from win7.

My 6 year old pc can play on Full blown graphics with no stutter, it has a Ati Radeon x850xt, an amd 3200xp+ cpu and 2gbs of ddr400 ram.

My dad's pc which is an amd Athlon II x2 245 (2.9 ghz) and on-board ati Radeon 3200 can play on Full blown graphics with no stutter.

Any other game that ISN'T Java seems to works fine, I even tried Recent Java 7 Builds and older Java 6 versions.

I just don't like being forced to play on fast graphics because it interferes with the gameplay in sorts. Monsters will spawn above trees and jump on you on fast graphics, as leaves are no longer see-through, so no light gets above the tree. I pretty much have to play on fast gfx and tiny render distance most of the time.

I know i'm ranting and raving but it's just SOOO frustrating, Mac users don't seem to have this issue, and with ubuntu I get considerably lower framerates, that's when I can get the intel xorg drivers to work in Ubuntu 11.04. I just feel slightly left out by intel, because i've played on lesser systems and it worked out great.

That is all, thanks for your time, and if anyone has extra tweaks out there before I get a dedicated card, please leave a message. Maybe I'm missing something here.

Well, nevermind all that.I got the most recent drivers (8.15.10.2361) and in the release notes there were some OpenGL fixes for another game, and it seemed to have fixed my issue, and i'm so happy.

It was strange that I couldn't play on Fancy because I knew the gpu was fully capable of handling it.

Thanks Intel, btw, I was religiously watching the driver section, and I didn't notice the new drivers at first because I was selecting "Windows 7 Enterprise 64 bit" and apparently in that section, it isnt updated yet.

So I checked back in the "Windows 7 64 bit" section and boom! there they were, and I was like 2 weeks late on the drivers. Shrugs, come on intel, update your driver sections properly. Or is it that the older driver (2342) is more stable, hence why it's in the "Enterprise" Section?

Anyhow I'm very happy about all this.

Thanks for hearing our concerns, and thanks for looking at bug reports and what not.